The family eventually got a cushioned tackling dummy for their aspiring football player. Before that, a decade ago, they improvised.

The Minnesota Vikings’ top pick in the May NFL Draft has come a long way since then, but it was in Kenosha — a city of about 100,000 people 40 miles south of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan — where Waynes, 23, got his start. And where he fell in love with defense.

He started playing tackle football at 10 years old and immediately became a running back. And he was good at, playing the high-profile position into his days at Mahone Middle School. But just before the start of eighth grade, Waynes told his coach, Joel Kaufmann, “He didn’t want the ball anymore, which in middle school is never heard of.”

Kaufmann, now vice principal at Kenosha’s Lance Middle School, found that remarkable.

“Everybody wants to be the quarterback or running back in middle school, and to me that stuck out,” he said. “I’ve never had a kid walk into my office and say, ‘Coach, I don’t want the ball.’ ”

Waynes was more interesting in hitting the guy with the ball, or, as the case soon became, trash cans.

“I knew that I’d rather hit somebody than get hit,” Waynes said. “I never really wanted to be in the spotlight. All this media stuff, it doesn’t really appeal to me. Back then, when I was getting hit, I said, ‘This ain’t for me.’ So I’d rather do the hitting.”

That plan has worked pretty well.

‘ALL PADDED UP’

After starring at Kenosha’s Mary Bradford High School, Waynes moved on to Michigan State and now is in line, the Vikings hope, to start opposite third-year man Xavier Rhodes to form an enviable NFL cornerback tandem.

Spring drills showed Waynes has the makings of a Mike Zimmer-type player. The Minnesota coach is a longtime NFL defensive coordinator who likes aggressive defenders who do the job without fanfare. He’ll get the chance to earn the job when training camp begins July 26 in Mankato.

“So far, he’s been great for us,” Zimmer said. “He’s smart. He’s learning and he’s trying to fit in. He understands his place and his role and he’s trying to get better every day.”

The 6-foot, 186-pound Waynes mans a position that has featured plenty of trash-talking, flamboyant players. Not Waynes, who has quietly gone about his business since his formative years in Kenosha. In fact, it seems nobody back home can remember him even mentioning the NFL as a goal.

Not so Waynes’ best friend, Melvin Gordon, a non-stop talker who never has been shy about promoting his abilities. A running back and the other star player at Bradford, Gordon went on to Wisconsin and finished second last season in voting for the Heisman Trophy before being drafted 15th overall by the San Diego Chargers.

“If they both walked into a room, you would know Melvin was there five seconds before he got there because you could hear him coming down the hall,” said Jeb Kennedy, who coached both players at Bradford and is now at Brookfield (Wis.) Central High School. “Trae would come for an hour, talk to two or three people, leave and you’d never know he was there.”

When it was time to play tackle football, though, Waynes did speak up. He was always one of the best players since flag football, but his parents were worried he might get hurt and initially had dissuaded him from playing.

His parents, both longtime middle school counselors in Kenosha, had been track stars. Ron was a long jumper at Cal Poly and competed in the 1984 Olympic Trials; mother Erin was a distance runner at Kansas State.

“Both my mom and my dad were like, ‘We don’t want you to get hurt’ and that type of thing,’ ” Waynes said. “I was kind of on the small side, but they saw the passion that I had for it.”

Waynes’ parents relented when they learned a family friend would be coaching the Colts. Scott Wells played softball with Ron, and had let the Waynes family stay at his house when they were having their home built in 2001.

Of course, the Waynes took all precautions.

“When he was younger, he had elbow pads, he had arm pads, he had hip pads, he had shin guards, he had knee pads,” Ron Waynes said. “He was all padded up.”

‘HE RAN HIM OVER’

None of it slowed Waynes, who had by that point developed into one of the fastest kids in town. He showed off his speed earlier this year when he ran the 40-yard dash in 4.31 seconds, the second-best time at the NFL Scouting Combine.

Waynes made his tackle football debut in the fall of 2002 at Quilling Field, still used for youth games in Kenosha. The park has a pair of scoreboards but no goalposts because young kids don’t kick in games.

“At that level, the tackling isn’t usually the greatest and the fastest kid on the field scores the most touchdowns if he can get around ot the outside,” Wells said on a recent afternoon at Quilling Field. “Trae scored probably in every game. He had good skills.”

Still, Wells had no idea Waynes would go on to play in the NFL.

“From when he was very young, we always knew athletically he was going to be good,” said Erin Waynes. “We just knew that he had a talent with sports and that’s why we put him in so many sports, just to see what he could do and see which one would be a fit for him and keep him busy.”

Waynes also played baseball and soccer and ran track. Then again, everything was a sport when it came to Waynes and his brother Mason, who is two years younger.

“He was my biggest rival in just about everything,” Mason said. “Who was going to sit in the front seat (of the car), who’s faster, who did better on an exam? He had a better reading score than me in a middle school standardized test, and he still brings that up.”

Mason Waynes just completed his junior year at Eastern Michigan, where he is a middle distance runner. He said it remains a “heavily debated question in the family” who is faster. Trae is generally regarded as being better in shorter distances and Mason in longer events; but there is much disagreement about who is faster in the 200 meters.

When it came to 90 feet, the distances between bases, Waynes was quite the speedster. His baseball coach at Bradford, Matt DeLuca, said he once averaged two steals game as a left fielder.

Waynes was a bit raw but hit about .360, and DeLuca said he had the ability to at least make the minor leagues. One problem, though: when on the diamond, Waynes sometimes forgot he wasn’t playing football.

“In high school baseball, you can’t run over the catcher,” DeLuca said. “But there was a time when Trae figured, ‘Well, he’s in my way and I’m not going to slide.’ So he ran him over. Trae was ejected from the game.”

Waynes said there were some who thought baseball actually was his best sport. As it turned out, though, he didn’t play after his junior year at Bradford.

In football, Waynes started as an outside linebacker and safety, be he really found his niche when he was moved to cornerback midway through his junior season. By the time he was a senior, he had orally committed to Michigan State.

“We could put him on the corner and let him eliminate their best (receiver), and then we were just playing 10 on 10,” Kennedy said.

‘A GREAT REMINDER’

With two future first-round picks in Waynes and Gordon, the Red Devils were considered favorites to win the state title when the two were seniors in 2010. But in the third game of the season, Waynes was dragged down from behind after returning a kickoff about 60 yards and broke his fibula and ankle and tore three ligaments.

His high school career was over.

“I tried to get up, but I realized I couldn’t move my leg,” Waynes said. “Our trainer came out and he said he knew right away it was broken. That ride to the hospital was probably the longest and most painful ride ever.”

Erin Waynes, an avid photographer, she was on the sidelines snapping away while her son ran back that kickoff.

“I’m thinking that this is a great shot and I’m clicking away and getting all these great shots, but then he goes down and he’s not getting up,” she said. “That was difficult.”

It didn’t get any easier over the next day or so. There were rumblings around Kenosha that perhaps the Spartans would withdraw their scholarship offer.

But then Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio called.

“He said, ‘We’re sticking with you. You’re our guy,’ ” Waynes said.

A photo by his mother of Waynes returning that kickoff, shot just before he was tackled, is displayed prominently in the basement of the family home.

“It’s a great reminder of how things can change in an instant, that we’re blessed and we need to be grateful and humble for what we have,” she said.

Without Waynes, the Red Devils lost in the state semifinals. And Waynes, not about to risk getting hurt stealing bases or running over the catcher, elected not to play baseball and instead ran track in the spring of his senior year.

Waynes was a bit humbled when, as a freshman in 2011, he was redshirted by Michigan State. Looking back, he’s grateful for the chance to learn from Spartans star cornerback Darqueze Dennard, who took him under his wing.

Ron Waynes said Dennard “looked out for Trae” and was “like an older brother.” By 2013, Dennard and Waynes were Michigan State’s shutdown corners and the Spartans won their first Rose Bowl in 26 years.

Dennard that season won the Jim Thorpe Award that goes to the top defensive back in the nation, and then was taken with No. 24 pick in the first round of the 2014 draft by the Cincinnati Bengals. Waynes was left to carry on.

“Going into my last year, I kind of wanted to win the Thorpe award,” Waynes said. “Quez told me that if I didn’t win it, he was going to be on my butt. That’s what I set out to do, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.”

The award went to Louisville’s Gerod Holliman, and Waynes left Michigan State with a year of eligibility remaining. He figures he’ll now have to vie for honors in Minnesota, where he will battle Terence Newman, Captain Munnerlyn and Josh Robinson for the starting job at left cornerback.

“As good as I push myself to be,” Waynes said of how successful he can be. “And Coach (Zimmer and other coaches) are going to push me. … They’re going to make me a better player. Hopefully, I can live up to the expectations.”

Waynes’ work ethic with the Vikings so far has been lauded, which is not a surprise. And now when he wants to get in some extra work after practice, he doesn’t need anyone to hold a trash can for him.

Chris joined the Pioneer Press in 2013 to cover the Vikings. He was a longtime NBA writer with the Akron Beacon Journal, Rocky Mountain News and AOL FanHouse. Before coming to Minnesota, he covered the Miami Heat and Dolphins for Fox Sports. Chris has won six awards in the past three Pro Football Writers of America contests. Chris is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he spent his college years watching the losingest team in the history of Division I-A football.

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